Johns’s criticism of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries grew at least in part out of his social status. As a gay artist working during one of the most homophobic decades in American history, Johns did not enjoy the same privilege that allowed the Abstract Expressionists – a group of predominantly heterosexual artists –to make their private desires publicly visible. For Johns, to do so would have been to expose himself to social and legal repercussions. Instead, he camouflaged his inability to be transparent by critiquing Abstract Expressionism’s seemingly inherent link between gesture and emotion. This set the stage for a generation of Minimal, Conceptual, and Pop artists to explore working methods that similarly replaced the expressive presence of the artist with more impersonal systems that articulated, even amplified, a lack of emotional or authorial trace.

Untitled bears a striking resemblance to a series of floor pieces that Andre began in 1962, just two years after making this work on paper. Whereas traditional sculpture establishes a hierarchy of viewing by requiring viewers to gaze up at it, Andre’s sculptures consist of flat metal squares in varying finishes installed on the floor, so that viewers can walk over them. To further foreclose on the autographic, Andre chose not to make these sculptures by hand, but rather to have them executed by machine, much like their typed antecedent. Part of the process of viewing Andre’s floor works includes walking over them—and the viewing experience becomes one of bodily movement through space and time, replacing the traditionally optical, deeply hierarchical relationship between a viewer and a sculpture. This attempt to banish the hierarchy between the (often literally) elevated sculpture and the viewer was very much in step with the culturally and politically democratizing efforts that have come to define the 1960s.

Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings (1970) is a portfolio of ten five-by-eight-inch notecards containing quotations about photography. Each quotation is attributed to a source, and one of the cards features not a quotation but a photocopy of a man’s arm. While some of the quotations are correctly attributed, others are completely fabricated; all of the statements offer what seems to be valid commentary on photography and its representations. While the photographic process is often associated with truth, a photograph never yields a truly faithful representation of its subject. At best it captures one specific instant from a singular vantage point. Bochner deploys photography as a vehicle for conceptual inquiry into the nature of representation. Once one understands that a certain statement may have value beyond the shifting veracity of its attribution, what further comes into sharp relief is the idea that truth itself is a construct that functions — much like numbers or the gestural — as an amalgam of privileged social notions.

Upon moving to New York in the early 1950s, Johns quickly joined a social circle that included Cy Twombly, whose Untitled (1971) is a stark departure from the anti-authorial work so often associated with Minimal and Conceptual art. A ruler, roughly articulated in graphite, cuts across the center of a surface almost entirely covered in gestural marks in white and light-colored gouache, oil, and crayon. Shapes and letters seem to emerge out of the otherwise illegible scrawl and lines. The ruler is segmented into horizontal dashes, above or below which numbers and letters appear. The dashes are irregular in length and placement, labeled according to a variety of different systems of signification including numbers, symbols, and the mysterious formulation “2 of 8, 4.” This amalgamation of systems of signification — writing and drawing, letters and numbers — poses a challenge to normative mechanisms for the organization of meaning. Indeterminate scribbles are the visual equivalent of noise. Neither overtly meaningful nor empty of meaning, they are instead immanent, perched at the edge of significance. Thus the signs in Twombly’s Untitled are full of potential but have yet to be subsumed into a system of signification.